What is contemplative computing?

Contemplative computing may sound like an oxymoron, but it's really quite simple. It's about how to use information technologies and social media so they're not endlessly distracting and demanding, but instead help us be more mindful, focused and creative.

About Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

I write about people, technology, and the worlds they make.

My book on contemplative computing, The Distraction Addiction, was published by Little, Brown and Company in 2013. (It's been translated into Dutch (as Verslaafd aan afleiding) and Spanish (as Enamorados de la Distracción); Russian, Chinese and Korean translations are in the works.)

My next book, Rest: Why Working Less Gets More Done, is under contract with Basic Books. Until it's out, you can follow my thinking about deliberate rest, creativity, and productivity on the project Web site.

Books

Writer Joe Fassler has a piece in The Atlantic on “How Fiction Can Survive in a Distracted World.” It’s mainly a conversation with author Kevin Barry, and it makes the case that “novelists shouldn’t even try to compete for people’s eyes,” which means competing with screens and everything that’s on them. Rather, "they should go for their ears instead…. Barry argued that the human voice still has the power to mesmerize us the way screens seem to, and that modern fiction should be heard and not seen."

Barry argues that "one thing can still arrest us, slow us down, and stop us in our tracks: the human voice."

I think this explains the explosion in podcasts and radio narratives. The human voice still holds our attention, allowing us to tune in to a narrative in a way we find increasingly difficult on the page.

Readers and listeners increasingly want their stories to come at them directly in the form of a human voice. While everybody says that book sales are dropping, there’s an explosion in literary events, book festivals, spoken word events. People want to listen, and they want to hear stories.

Barry uses Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood to illustrate the kind of approach he’s advocating. I won’t reproduce it all here, or try to summarize it; it’s long, and deserves to read. But I’ll highlight this bit:

I love the refrain, “listen,” which repeats all the way through the work:

Listen. It is night moving in the streets …Listen. It is night in the chill, squat chapel, hymning in bonnet and brooch and bombazine black …Time passes. Listen. Time passes.

With this injunction to listen, Thomas is saying stop, stop, stop. He’s slowing us down so that we can enter this world.

This is striking because stopping is exactly what we instinctively do when we’re listening carefully to something. If you watch people talking on their phones while talking, you’ll often see them slow down or pause when they’re paying really close attention to the conversation. I’m one of those people who usually will pace around when talking, but I find when I really have to listen to someone, I stand still.

When we’re out on a walk and we want to listen for something— a bird, or something in the bushes— what do we naturally do? We stop. We still the self-generated noise that usually surrounds us, so we can better hear what’s going on outside ourselves. So this injunction to stop, stop, stop isn’t one that we only treat as a metaphor; in our daily lives, there’s an embodied aspect to concentration and listening as well. Listening requires slowing down, or being still.

Two new books, The Organized Mind by psychologist Daniel Levitin, and Matthew Crawford’s The World Beyond Your Head, talk about the importance of learning how to intelligently offload memory and tasks onto your physical environment. This is something that we often do without much thought— anyone who’s written a note to themselves, or leaves a bag near the front door so they’ll remember to take it to work the next day, has done this— and indeed I talk about it a little bit in The Distraction Addiction. But they both make the case that this is a skill worth paying more attention to, and worth cultivating more consciously.

As Oliver Burkeman explains in a recent review, Levitin argues that lots of "information overload" problems are really problems of information management and attention management; and that seen this way, the solution

says Levitin, is to “shift the burden of organising from our brains to the external world”. Presidents and celebrities employ people to “narrow the attentional filter”, making sure they only see the stuff they need to see. But if you can’t afford an entourage, use the physical environment instead. Levitin’s specific tips might not blow your mind. One is to leave items you need to take to work on the doormat, so you’ll see them on leaving; another is to keep stacks of index cards for stray ideas and to-dos, then designate a time to gather and process them…. These aren’t revolutionary. Yet it’s intriguing to think of them not as one-off fixes for absent-mindedness but part of a comprehensive plan to structure how information flows through your life.

Crawford’s The World Beyond Your Head (an excerpt is here) explains how this isn’t just something that “knowledge workers” (gag) do: it’s something that good bartenders, cooks, and other people who have to juggle lots of tasks learn to do.

A bartender gets an order from a waitress: a vodka and soda, a glass of house red, a martini up, and a mojito. What does he do? He lays out the four different kinds of glass that the drinks require in a row, so he doesn’t have to remember them. If another order comes in while he is working on the first, he lays out more glasses. In this way, the sequence of orders, as well as the content of each order, is represented in a spatial arrangement that is visible at a glance. It is in the world, rather than in his head.

Consider a short-order cook on the breakfast shift. As he finishes his coffee, the first order of the morning comes in: a sausage, onion, and mushroom omelet with wheat toast. The cook lays out the already chopped sausage next to the pan, the onions next to the sausage, then the bread, and finally the mushrooms, farthest from the pan. He now has the ingredients in a spatial order that corresponds to the temporal order in which he will require them: once it gets hot, the sausage will provide the grease in which the onions will cook, and the onions take longer to fry than the mushrooms do. He places the bread between the onions and the mushrooms as a reminder to himself to start toasting the bread at such a time that the toast will be ready just as he is sliding the omelet out of the pan.

Crawford mentions the work of David Kirsh, particularly his essay “The Intelligent Use of Space,” and Andy Clark’s work on embodied cognition (which I’ve written about at length). I’m not at all surprised that he talks about these different crafts and jobs: anyone who’s a philosophy Ph.D. who makes a living as a motorcycle repairman will have a respect for varied types of work. Crawford’s last book, Shop Class as Soul Craft, upended our casual assumption that any kind of work that involves “content” is complicated, highly-skilled, and elite, while anything that involves mere stuff or machines or service is essentially for dullards.

if I were in Seattle, I’d go to this, and not just because the title name-checks my book: Matthew Crawford is speaking about his new book, The World Beyond Your Head.

Many point to our technology addiction (namely, the influx of smart phones and the internet) as the root of society’s lack of focus, but according to Matthew Crawford (Shop Class as Soulcraft) the problem goes much deeper. Crawford’s The World Beyond Your Head takes a historical approach to our mass-distraction, revealing that the trouble can be traced to the very foundations of Western culture in the Enlightenment. From short-order cooks to gambling addicts, he examines success stories of the extreme focus many of us seek, but fail to achieve. He’ll share his findings on what it takes to refocus our lives–by mastering our minds–and the implications this has for culture, democracy, and even how children are raised.

None of this really matters, for within a few chapters it becomes painfully obvious that Susan Greenfield’s book is little more than a fan-fiction about Susan Greenfield. The narrators are lifeless caricatures devoid of any real voice or personality of their own, and seem to exist solely for the purpose of regurgitating Greenfield’s theories over endless pages of mind-numbingly tedious exposition.

In this case, Robbins' critique comes down this:

You can’t argue against Greenfield’s ideas because when you boil away all the conjecture, the unanswered questions, the innuendo, what’s left is … nothing much.

It’s not that the topic isn’t worth talking about. The world is changing, and our brains are adapting to that new world. Good analysis and research looking at the co-evolution of mind and society can only be a good thing. The problem is that Greenfield adds absolutely nothing to this debate.

This is a book about the present and what you can do right now to improve your relationship with technology. This is not an “anti-technology” book, nor is it a “pro-technology” book. Asking whether I’m “pro-“ or “anti-technology” is like asking me if I’m “pro-” or “anti-air.” It doesn’t matter how technology itself makes me feel; it’s there, and it’s always going to be there….

[I]f you are alive today, you are using technology in some way every day, so you might as well have an intentional relationship with it and know what you are doing.

Analog August is a way to engineer solitude and quiet in a world that’s become addicted to constant connections.

It’s not anti-technology—it’s pro-people. We’re giving ourselves a trip to the brain spa in order to rediscover the quiet joys of solitary walks, face-to-face relations, and a good book.

Here’s their advice about how to do it:

Remember you’re going offline on purpose. You might feel stressed at first, but it’s all part of the process of your summer digital detox. Return to something akin to the technological circumstances from your childhood. Reclaim what we’ve lost in a world of constant connection with these recommendations:

This is good, but it’s also important to remember that our attention and old, Tolstoy-reading brains don’t just reawaken when we turn off devices (though I love the fact that War and Peace is one of the books Penguin will send you if you buy Harris’ book and sign up for Analog August).

As I explained in this piece, it’s better to think of this not in terms of negative time— i.e., a period defined by an absence of devices and connections— but rather as a positive time— an opportunity to do different, engaging things that you don’t normally make room for, and to practice slowing down your sense of time.

As one of the people I interviewed for my book put it, it’s amazing how much time you have when you don’t divide it into 30-second chunks.

Jeremy Greenfield has a good piece in The Atlantic about how the fight between Amazon and Hachette (the publishing conglomerate that owns Little, Brown, which published The Distraction Addiction) could affect the future of ideas. The bottom line: Amazon is now in a position to squeeze publishers so hard it’ll destroy the serious nonfiction market.

As Mike Shatzkin, a colleague of Greenfield’s puts it, in a scenario where "you can’t publish a book without them,” Amazon would naturally push publishers to turn out reliable money-makers, and to ignore long shots. In other words, "we’ll still have lots of romance books and James Patterson will still write his books. But serious nonfiction books won't get published. Those are the books that will go first."

As Greenfield elaborates,

Nonfiction books, like Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs, are expensive and risky to produce and rarely sell well, yet many of these books drive intellectual thinking in the U.S. Robert Caro's latest book on Lyndon Johnson The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson took nearly a decade to write—and that means investment and risk.

Think of book publishers like venture capital firms. They invest in individual titles in the form of advances and the sunk costs of editing, packaging and distributing a book. Most of those bets lose money. Some make a lot of money (for every Fifty Shades of Grey there are dozens of money-losing duds). It all evens out to an industry where a strong year is one where a publisher clears a 10 percent profit margin.

As more book sales flowed through Amazon, it would have even more direct control over what people read. The company would have little incentive, for instance, to surface books readers are less likely to buy. If The Hunger Games is all the rage, then the company is best served pushing that title toward its readers at the expense of other books.

The comparison with venture capital is actually a pretty good one, though the perks in book writing aren’t nearly as good; on the other hand, you can’t be forced out by your editor right before your book is published, and replaced by someone who knows a lot about marketing. (Though maybe that’s something publishers should think about.)

In the meantime, until this gets resolved, Amazon is slowing delivery of some Hachette books, has eliminated the discount, and has a “Similar Items at a Lower Price” banner on my book’s page. (What I especially love about this is that those other books are at a lower price because Amazon has set the price.)

Walking is not sport, he says, in the first line of his book, A Philosophy of Walking. Sport is a discipline, "an ethic, a labour". It is a performance. Walking, on the other hand, "is the best way to go more slowly than any other method that has ever been found". If you want to go faster, he says, don't walk. Do something else: drive, slide, fly....

As a philosopher, his interest is in "ordinary things", he says. In Britain, academic philosophy is, largely, analytical philosophy. It's concerned with logic, with language. Whereas in France, he belongs to "a new generation that is concerned with the… quotidien. The everyday."

And you see the philosophy of walking as part of the philosophy of the everyday?

"Yes. It is still looking at the questions of eternity, solitude, time and space… But on the basis of experience. On the basis of very simple, very ordinary things."

He'd always enjoyed walking but it was only when he started his philosophical studies that Gros started noticing how many great philosophers were also great walkers. "That is, it was not just that walking was a distraction from their work. It was that walking was really their element. It was the condition of their work."

Coverley's interesting thesis is, essentially, that walking and writing are one activity. To illustrate this, after a short discussion of pilgrim writers, he looks at a diverse range of walker-writers stretching from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to his fellow modern-day psychogeographer Iain Sinclair, via John Clare, William Blake, the English and American romantic poets, Parisian flâneurs, Rudolf Hess and the situationist international to support it. His walker/writers are what might be called romantic individualists. For a Rousseau or a William Wordsworth, the act of walking through the world was not primarily about the world itself; they were much more concerned with walking into their inner worlds. From the day Rousseau turned his back on his native city, these peripatetic writer-thinkers were bent on walking into a kind of alienated individuality. Coverley's walkers are professional outsiders; visionaries and dreamers on the road.

The latter makes me want to visit Connemara, on the western coast of Ireland; the first makes me just want to go back to Paris.

One of the points of the book is that minds are not spiritual somethings, off in faraway neverlands. We are not minds who have bodies: we arebodies. And ‘mind’ is a verb, not a neat little noun — it’s something we do.

So the gym, swimming pool or yoga studio needn’t be spots for mindless physicality, and scholarship needn’t be sedentary. We can think through exercise. It can offer new ideas and impressions. It can also help to develop valuable dispositions: also known as ‘virtues’....

Young also has a piece in The Guardian, which I missed until tonight, about Darwin and exercise:

The grandfather of modern evolutionary theory walked in rain and sunshine, in youth and age, in company and solitude. This constitutional was not just for cardiovascular fitness, or to post his thousands of letters. It was a vital part of his intellectual routine.

Darwin's son said the naturalist's walks were for his "hard thinking": not simply because he analysed data, but because he allowed his mind to wander.... Obviously walking was not responsible for Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, but a good footslog was certainly part of his cognitive labour – and still is for many today.

As someone who bicycles to work regularly, and for whom the gym is a reward for getting through work-- if I edit another 20 pages, I can hit the weights and rowing machine (really just an excuse for the sauna)-- I can testify that this is right on.

I wish I'd discovered it a lot earlier: for a long time I thought of myself as someone who didn't really like exercise, but once I reached my 40s, two things happened. First, I saw both my father (who's in his 70s) swimming miles each week and my kids playing sports, and realized that my self-image of myself as non-athletic probably was completely wrong. Second, I read John Ratey's great book Spark, and it (along with Laurence Gonzalez's Deep Survival and George Valliant's work on the Harvard Grant Study) made me realize just how important serious exercise is for sustained intellectual success.

Of course, after a moment's reflection it makes perfect sense. Given how important efficient blood flow is to keeping the brain running, and how many calories those three pound of electrified biochemistry within our skulls consume, it should be no surprise that the same things that make us physically strong make us mentally sharper as well. But in a more profound sense we're not just brains carried around in bodies: our minds, as Andy Clark will tell you, extend through brain and body (and into our most-trusted devices as well).

She also makes a great point about how thinking about books as technology lets us see their value more clearly, and think more usefully about how printed and digital media can coexist in the future:

Literary types privilege the book as the ultimate form for reading. To privilege the book as reading, though—to forget that it is a technology—is analogous to forgetting one has a body (something lit types are also wont to do), and to forget one has a body is to let it soften and lay to waste. When you recognize the book as technology, you realize that print and screen, like body and mind, are not mutually exclusive mediums, but that they are increasingly mutually influencing.

Of course there's going to be an electronic version of The Distraction Addiction, and it'll make its way into the great maw of Google Books at some point; but I didn't realize until today that Hachette had a deal with OpenBook to make a preview of the book available online.

For decades Kirkus Reviews has been one of the more important venues for book reviews, and one of the more feared. As the New York Timesreported in 2009,

“When I was a book publicist, the worst part of my job was having to read a Kirkus review over the phone to an author. 2 cigs before, 2 after,” recalled Laura Zigman, an author and former book publicist for Alfred A. Knopf, in a Twitter post.

Kirkus folded in 2009, but reopened the next year when it was purchased by real estate developer, NBA team owner and bibliophile Herb Simon.

In this week's issue (which is behind a paywall) they have a review of The Distraction Addiction, and it's pretty positive. They describe it as "A well-researched program to help reclaim personal downtime from the inundation of cyberinformation."

Why's this matter? Because Kirkus is one of those places that buyers and bookstore owners consult when they're deciding what books to order and stock. The Times again:

Although typically not seen by the general public — except in blurbs on books or excerpted on barnesandnoble.com — Kirkus reviews were often used by librarians and booksellers when deciding how to stock their shelves.

“None of us can read everything we suggest, so we lean fairly heavily on reviews and reviewers as basically our own advisers,” said David Wright, a fiction librarian and readers’ adviser for the Seattle Public Library.

Mr. Wright, who said he read reviews from Kirkus as well as its rivals Publishers Weekly [which reviewed the book too], Booklist and Library Journal, said the reviewers for these publications “always really seemed like this gathering of friends and family that you could gather to get feedback on what really was in a book to see if a reader might like it.” He added, “Kirkus has always anchored that table.”

So, good news, especially since we're reaching that stage in the process where buyers start ordering copies!

While reading Damon Young's 2008 book Distraction-- which I highly recommend-- I came across this nice bit about technology, freedom, and responsibility.

He first makes the case that the idea of becoming freer by abandoning technology won't work:

The essence of technology isn't cogs or computer chips, it's our way of being, our "essence." If this is so, then there's no point trying to flee to Arcadia-- we can only liberate technology as we unfetter ourselves....

From the humble crafts of Aristotle's Greece to the mechnical presses that printed Heidegger's Being and Time and the keyboard I'm typing on, a varied but continuous chain of technology is in use. In that sense, we can't destroy technology, because we're indissolubly linked with it. We can't define ourselves against machines, because they're part of us.

He then goes on to talk about Star Trek's Borg as an example of an extreme engagement with technology, but then argues that

there is one crucial way in which we are not the Borg: if we are inextricably linked to technology, we don't have the luxury of a "hive mind." We have the weight of liberty: the opportunity and obligation to craft a life.... If we're the slaves of technological necessity, we have to forge our own necessities. In the name of everyday, ordinary freedom, we must be what machines can never be: the custodians of ourselves.

This is a simple, good way to think about everyday technologies: do they increase your sense of freedom, or do they constrain you?

In the tenth century BC, the priests of India devised the Brahmodya competition, which would become a model of authentic theological discourse. The object was to find a verbal formula to define the Brahman, the ultimate and inexpressible reality beyond human understanding. The idea was to push language as far as it would go, until participants became aware of the ineffable. The challenger, drawing on his immense erudition, began the process by asking an enigmatic question and his opponents had to reply in a way that was apt but equally inscrutable. The winner was the contestant who reduced the others to silence. In that moment of silence, the Brahman was present - not in the ingenious verbal declarations but in the stunning realisation of the impotence of speech. Nearly all religious traditions have devised their own versions of this exercise. It was not a frustrating experience; the finale can, perhaps, be compared to the moment at the end of the symphony, when there is a full and pregnant beat of silence in the concert hall before the applause begins. The aim of good theology is to help the audience to live for a while in that silence.

This means that at some point theology must remind us of what God is not. Apophatic or 'speechless' theology is often called 'negative', because it helps us to realise that when we encounter transcendence we have reached the end of what words can do. It is a habit of mind that we have lost sight of in our talkative age of information.

One of the decisions I made when writing my book was that I wouldn't attack the work of people who've written about digital distraction, even when I disagreed with them. It can be fun to read someone who enjoys criticizing other people and does it well (paging Evgeny Morozov), but I realized that I was more content positioning The Distraction Addiction as a "Yes, and..." (as they say in improv) to The Shallows or Alone Together or other books.

The Internet is changing the way we think? Yes, and... we can take charge of that process.

All media innovations, including printed books, have been greeted as apocalyptic changes in civilization and our capacity to think? Yes, and... there's a long history of developing new contemplative practices to deal with the problems those media create.

You get the idea. This came to mind today as I was reading a 2010 article in the Observer about Clay Shirky:

Mr. Shirky has recently found himself mulling over the computer scientist Jaron Lanier’s book, You Are Not a Gadget, in which Mr. Lanier criticizes the Internet’s propensity for groupthink, shoddy group collaboration and “digital Maoism”; and technology journalist Nicholas Carr’s just-published book The Shallows, which argues that as the Internet replaces print, the new medium is rewiring our brains and wrecking our ability to focus deeply.

“What’s interesting to me is that I’m reading those books and nodding my head right up until the moment comes for the authors to say, ‘Here’s what we ought to do about it,’” said Mr. Shirky. “The stuff that Nick says is wrong with the Internet is wrong with the Internet. The distraction is, I think, the biggest problem. But what’s interesting about The Shallows is that it doesn’t actually propose what to do about it.” (“My interest is description, not prescription,” retorted Mr. Carr in an email.)

As far as I'm concerned, prescription is what's really interesting. I'm certainly glad that Nick Carr wrote The Shallows; I think for all its flaws, it's a great first pass at describing the problem we have living with always-on devices. But at the same time, I firmly believe that you can't describe the problem adequately unless you've grappled with the problem of solving it.

For my book I interviewed a number of people about how they chose books versus digital media. I found that for smart readers-- people who read a lot, and who think seriously about what they need to get out of different kidns of reading-- affordances were the key, and for some types of reading that gave paper some decided advantages.

Truth be known, both print and digital communications have environmental costs. So how do you most responsibly decide when to view on screen and when to print? Follow the latest research by taking a moment to scan this handy infographic. Then pause and use the insights you’ve gained to make the right call.

Residencies have long been the writer’s last defense against the distractions of the outside world. But now the incessant digital static of the Internet, that irresistible force we live in such close, constant contact with, is setting the deep-immersion experience necessary to produce great works of literature against a constant barrage of information. Whenever the work becomes difficult (i.e. every 10 minutes), the Web is there with promises of more barely relevant factoids.

The MacDowell Colony, the oldest artists' colony in the United States, opened its doors in 1907, at a time when the biggest technical distractions would have been electric lighting and the telegraph. Of course, you also would have had to deal with the everyday distractions of family, your day job, and all the other stuff we've had to balance for centuries. And if you lived in a city, you might also have to deal with incessant noise, horrible smells in the summer, and the prospect of cholera outbreaks. (One day I'll write a history of distraction and get to the bottom of this-- document what it was that people in previous centuries were getting away from, and looking for, when they went on retreat.)

And of course the problem isn't just that cell towers and wifi access at writers' retreats are a problem; the same technology that distracts writers is also essential now for professional self-fashioning and self-promotion.

[B]ook marketing now almost always requires the author’s regular engagement with his disembodied fans. Junot Díaz had finally weaned himself off Facebook when his publisher asked him to jump back on to promote This Is How You Lose Her. It had been so hard “to wean myself off the damn e-crack, and here I was jumping back in voluntarily,” he said. “Took only about two days to get right back to my check-it-every-five-seconds cycle.” He went from reading something like a book a week to reading a book a month: a projected total loss of 36 books per year.

As someone who just created a public author page on Facebook, I can certainly sympathize. I'm just starting to think about how much I want to engage with readers-- you don't want to be aloof, but at the same time if you're an expert on conquering digital distraction you don't' want to fall prey to it yourself!

While at first blush it might seem like the erosion of enforced solitude in writers' retreats is one of those issues for which the phrase "First World problems" doesn't convey enough elite privilege, the issue was clarified by an exchange between newly-published author Julian Tepper and the great Philip Roth, recounted in the Paris Review. Tepper, who works at a diner Roth visits, had just given Roth a copy of his new novel-- and then:

Roth, who, the world would learn sixteen days later, was retiring from writing, said, in an even tone, with seeming sincerity, “Yeah, this is great. But I would quit while you’re ahead. Really, it’s an awful field. Just torture. Awful. You write and write, and you have to throw almost all of it away because it’s not any good. I would say just stop now. You don’t want to do this to yourself. That’s my advice to you.”

I managed, “It’s too late, sir. There’s no turning back. I’m in.”

Nodding slowly, he said to me, “Well then, good luck.”

After which I went back to work.

Okay, so that's a great story, actually, and Tepper tells it well. But then he goes on to say:

I still feel strongly that the one thing a writer has above all else, the reward which is bigger than anything that may come to him after huge advances and Hollywood adaptations, is the weapon against boredom. The question of how to spend his time, what to do today, tomorrow, and during all the other pockets of time in between when some doing is required: this is not applicable to the writer. For he can always lose himself in the act of writing and make time vanish. After which, he actually has something to show for his efforts. Not bad. Very good, in fact. Maybe too romantic a conceit, but this, I believed, was the great prize for being born … an author.

Elizabeth Gilbert was incredulous: "seriously--is writing really all that difficult?"

Yes, of course, it is; I know this personally--but is it that much more difficult than other things? Is it more difficult than working in a steel mill, or raising a child alone, or commuting three hours a day to a deeply unsatisfying cubicle job, or doing laundry in a nursing home, or running a hospital ward, or being a luggage handler, or digging septic systems, or waiting tables at a delicatessen, or--for that matter--pretty much anything else that people do?

Not really, right?

In fact, I'm going to go out on a limb here and share a little secret about the writing life that nobody likes to admit: Compared to almost every other occupation on earth, it's f*cking great. I say this as somebody who spent years earning exactly zero dollars for my writing (while waiting tables, like Mr. Tepper) and who now makes many dollars at it. But zero dollars or many dollars, I can honestly say it's the best life there is, because you get to live within the realm of your own mind, and that is a profoundly rare human privilege.

People who make it as writers are intensely self-directed, and enjoy that part of the work. Now, that doesn't mean were all reclusive, or that the rest of the business doesn't interest us: one of the thing I've really enjoyed about The Distraction Addiction experience-- not the research and writing, but the search for people to blurb the book, the dealing with the marketing and promotions people, the arguments over what the cover art should look like-- is that I've learned a lot about the industry, about the craft of turning 90,000 words into that object on the table at your local bookstore, and about how low the odds of you succeeding are without a great agent and editor (something I've talked about before). For someone who's spent a lifetime around books, and is no stranger to academic and corporate and magazine writing, it's been very eye-opening, in a good way.

But ultimately, all the machinery and plans and pitches rely on my ability to get up at 5 AM and write undistractedfor a few hours, several days a week, for a couple years; to live in my own mind; to push ideas as far as I possibly can; and, as Tepper puts it, to lose myself in the act of writing and make time vanish-- and reemerge at the end of that with words worth keeping. That's the heart of writing, what has to be preserved at all costs, and what the shiny-blinky attractiveness of the Web threatens.